Iron in Her Soul

HER steely determination has been her hallmark. But as the hate campaign against her mounts, the unflappable Taslima Nasreen, for a moment, displays a nervous tic. Riding a literary storm, the Bangladeshi writer distractedly strikes one matchstick after another as if hearing the fundamentalist cries of Hang Taslima Nasreenl Break her legs] "Sorry, this is a bad habit with me. What? Nervous? Me? Not really. But who likes to listen to abuse all the time?" she says as she finally lights up a Benson & Hedges in her 10th floor apartment in downtown Dhaka, ringed by security outside and within.

Well, abuse is what has been mostly coming her way for the past few months. Reviling Taslima seems to have become a national pastime in Bangladesh. Ever since the 31 -year-old feminist writer, and doctor by training, incurred the wrath of the clergy with Lajja (Shame), her novella on the communal atrocities committed against the minorities in Bangladesh in the wake of the Ayodhya demolition, the entire country seems to be sticking pins into a Taslima voodoo doll. The fundamentalists have issued a fatwa against her. And last fortnight religious groups flocked together in a public rally in Dhaka ratifying the damning indictment of Nasreen: "The price of blasphemy is capital punishment." Mocking her, a cleric from Cox's Bazar in southern Bangladesh has even offered to marry her to mend her "errant" ways through love. All this has turned the Nasreen affair into big business today both in Bangladesh and in India. Her books have sold some four lakh copies already. Lajja, a seven-day rush job on her personal computer, sold over 50.000 copies in her country within six months before it was banned by the Government for its "inflammatory potential". The reactions to Lajja have been extreme. Bangladesh's best-selling novelist Imdadul Haq Milon, for instance, is critical: "Lajja is extremely one-sided. It can only strengthen the communal forces." On the other hand, the country's leading poet, Shamsur Rahman, says: "It's an important documentation on the atrocities against minorities. It's an eye-opener."

In the eye of all this, Nasreen's firebrand spirit remains undiminished. For her, fundamentalist ire has long been a way of life. Last year, the fundamentalists banded together under the frightening banner of Taslima Nasreen Peshan Committee (Taslima Nasreen Suppression Committee), demanding a ban on her work; occasionally they have even burnt her books, heckled her at book fairs and inundated her with hate mail. "Life has never been very easy for me writing about religion and relationships in my country," says the troubled writer. But it has also never been so bad. Now Nasreen has to live a life of virtual captivity. At her sprawling Shantinagar apartment, which she bought recently and made possible by family money and book sales (the fundamentalists allege the bjp paid her Rs 45 lakh to write Lajja), visitors are frisked and monitored. As a result, Nasreen- who was an anaesthesiologist at Dhaka Medical College three years ago-cannot even treat any patients: "I want to treat patients sometimes but I can't."

Typically, for a woman who has such an excess of fire in her belly, it is the boredom of captivity that is more galling than the danger. To escape her cooped up high-rise life, she ventures out these days in her gleaming new Toyota Corolla, its windows rolled up. Her only trips out are to the music shops on Dhaka's Bailey Road to check out the latest talent in Rabindra Sangeet and folk. Occasionally, she meets a few friends and slips into a Chinese restaurant to have chilly prawns and hilsa.

Most of her time, however, is spent sitting in her verandah caged in by a grille, watching the sun go down over the Dhaka skyline. And working on her two columns and her new novel Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood). In between there may be media interviews or a game of patience with Bangladeshi poet Nirmalendu Goon on his Mackintosh PC. There are moments when the despair surfaces. "I feel like crying," she says. "I love to travel and meet people. But I can't. I go through severe depression. Do I have to live like this all my life?"

It's a question that has probably been haunting Nasreen ever since she first started writing. Nasreen's writings have always been too iconoclastic for a society as hidebound as Bangladesh's. Her defiant writings first came into the limelight three years ago when her collection of 78 essays, Nirbachito Kalam (Selected Columns) hit the market and went on to become one of the biggest selling Bengali books- about two lakh copies. Nasreen's anger and anguish, which had been building after she completed her mbbs from her hometown in Mymensingh district, screamed out of every page of Kalam. She flayed the Koran and its Hadiths, quoting its tenets to prove that religion "discriminates against women and treats them like sexual commodities". "When a love letter was discovered in my books when I was young, my parents raised Cain. What about the love letters to my brother hidden in his books?" she asks. She has written explicitly about male and female sexuality. The titles of her books reveal a lot: one collection of essays is called Nostho Meyer Nostho Godyo (The Fallen Prose Of A Fallen Girl); another is called Amar Kichu Jaye Ashe Na (I Couldn't Care Less).

All this is designed to raise hackles. Critics have always wailed that she walks the thin line between ultra-feminism and sexual anarchy. When two bored housewives in one of her stories talked about female orgasm, her detractors chided her for being pornographic. Her defence: "In Bangladesh, if you mention the word 'breasts', you're branded as pornographic." Of course, Nasreen can go to extremes: she once exhorted women to start raping men.

A great deal of her attitude towards men has probably been shaped by her three unsuccessful marriages in the last 10 years-one to a poet and two with journalists.' 'No more marriages for me," says Nasreen. But more than anything else, it is her personal experiences that have determined her feminist ideas. "When I was only nine, I felt the discrimination against women for the first time," she says. "I loved to play in the fields, but when I was 10,1 was told not to go out any longer. 'Good girls don't go out', I was told. But my two brothers could." She was also stirred when some boys scalded her with a burning cigarette "for perverse fun'' while returning from a cinema show during her teens. It was the rage that made the young Nasreen give up her first love, painting, and.take to writing. The daughter of a doctor, she always wanted to be an architect. "I never thought writing would become a profession for me," she says. But Nasreen hasn't looked back since her first book of poems was released in 1986.

For Nasreen, the Lajja controversy has been a real eye-opener. "I used to feel very lonely after the fatwa. I thought I had more enemies than friends. But today, I know I'm not alone. There are people who love me," she says. International writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gunter Grass, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Amy Tan and, of course, her comrade in distress Salman Rushdie, have come out in support of her, decrying the fatwa. The Guardian even dubbed her the female Rushdie, but Nasreen shrugged off the encomium saying: "I don't want to be compared with anybody. I am what I am. I have long years of writing ahead of me."

At home, the firebrand feminist-writer hardly betrays the restless angry spirit within. In an informal skirt and blouse, she looks like the girl next door and a pucca Bengali who loves her adda, fish-curry and poems. Ask her if she thinks that women should start raping men to get even and she smiles: "I know, I wrote this. A lot of my essays in Kalam reflected my mood during the time of writing. I am angry, hopeful and moody." The immaturity shows up occasionally: she quotes from Germaine Greer, Virginia Woolf and Oriana Fallaci in her essays, but insists she's "never been influenced by anybody"; and suddenly she quotes Satyajit Ray and the flashy editor of an Indian magazine in the same breath.

When the telephone stops ringing and the journalists finish with their interviews, Nasreen retires to her air-conditioned study stacked with books. Most symbolic of her attitude towards life are the three dolls on her desk-"They are all working women, mind you." The collection of books ranges from her favourite Bengali writers to a copy of the Indian Penal Code to Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives. Today, she is completing her 16th book, another novel about the growing up of a Muslim girl in rural Bangladesh, and writing an account of her captive life for The New York Times.

The besieged writer deserves every praise that may come her way, simply for her amazing courage in living by her forthright convictions in a society where women and radical views are meant to be kept in the closet.

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